May 26 2010
Light can force the electrons at the surface of a metal to collectively oscillate. Coupling these oscillations with photons-creating 'surface plasmon polaritons' or SPPs-could lead to intriguing applications in communications, information processing and sensing since SPPs oscillate at very high frequencies that enable, potentially, the transfer of large volumes of data.
First, however, scientists need a way to efficiently capture SPPs. Now, Ping Bai and co-workers from the A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore have proposed and analyzed theoretically an electronic device that detects SPPs.
In the field of photonics, light is used to reproduce the functionality of electronics but at much higher speeds. However, while modern semiconductor processing can produce nanometer-size electronic devices, diffraction limits the size of optical components to approximately one micrometer. In plasmonics, the application of SPPs, the advantages of both are married. “Plasmonics allows light to propagate along sub-100 nanometer tracks and to be focused into a very small volume,” explains Bai. Plasmonics technology, however, is in its infancy, and researchers are still developing the basic components that engineers take for granted in electronics and photonics.
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